Smart Phones & The Invisible Cord

Children nowadays are connected to an invisible cord that is yanked once in a while. It is terrible to see how completely normal children change once they have access to smart phones. Not all of them but quite a few. The ones that don´t have any (like my son) are relentlessly bullied. I have been seriously thinking about sending my son to a catholic private school but it is to far away. I also don´t know whether it would help. As you write many Christians don´t understand the menace that smart phones pose and therefore don´t restrict the usage. Especially the less educated think having smart phones will help their kids navigate the future world. Sometimes I could cry so sad is all that.

Take a family I know. The father is a good mechanic who will always find a job.The mother is a simple sales woman. Their son will be none of that. He has a smart phone since he is 9 and completely glued to it. His thumb is probably able to do amazing swipe gestures but that is all he learns. Academically he is a disaster. The worst is that when he grows up he will not be able to do anything with his hands except swiping as he never does anything else. He will be totally useless in every sense of the world. What makes my blood boil is that there are thousands and thousands out there like that. And nobody telling people the truth.

It both goes deeper than standard critiques of smart phones and stays too shallow because she doesn’t have a metaphysics. She knows it’s a time bomb, but she doesn’t really have a way of seeing the deeper existential and cosmological threat it poses our children. Oddly enough, there’s a gay marriage connection early on in the book because her thesis is that we create new technologies, and the new technologies create us anew. An early proponent of robots saw no problem with robot-human interface, and accuses her of being a bigot because she sees this not as an advance, but as a privation of a fully human reality.

But what smart phones, I think, challenge us on is the deepest questions of meaning and purpose. In the end, when we are left to our own devices, they re-constitute us. We are differently human to a point, but our kids are now re-wired. Think about how Tinder has re-wired us: we f–k on the front end, only to decide if we want to make ourselves vulnerable enough later for a “real” relationship. F–king (anonymously via Tinder etc) is shaking hands. What?

And why do we really have a problem with smartphones? Isn’t it because we know that they distract us from our vocations, our ultimate ends? To know, love, and serve God? What are we for?

Smart phones tell us that we are for them.

I see it with the games I let my kids play on the iPad: “Daddy, I need to check to see if my dragons hatched.”

He feels compelled to serve the device.

I don’t know where this is going, but there is a huge makeover happening, right in front of us, and no one is REALLY caring all that much. So odd.

Yes, immense opportunity cost being paid in time lost to developing motor and cognitive skills, along with a sense of competence and boundaries of the self, in meeting the physical resistance of the real world.
And as Father Martin says on pg. 71 of The Benedict Option, these children are also paying a huge price in the loss of tine spent in human interaction, which is how they learn to give and receive love.
Part of the blame lies in people’s passive acceptance of the role of marketing in the culture. I think Christians need to spend more time discerning the presence/effects of, and evaluating the moral implications of, the act of persuasion–within and toward people. How ethical is a decision to major in marketing, to have a marketing person on staff, to try to sell something to a person?

Half a century ago I was making the point that it is naive to think that reading books always helps children (it often does but reading the wrong books at an impressionable age can do harm). It’s the same with television, smartphones, and anything else. Parents need to be very careful about what their kids are exposed to and that is very difficult in today’s world.

Someone is going to make a bundle of money by making a hack to the Android operating system that will limit the phones access to a limited number of sites and that will block sending or receiving of pictures

I teach AP English at a small Christian school. I am anticipating the work of a student who does not own a phone and has no Facebook account. I allow students to text or message me, but this student will have to use a parent’s phone if he has a question about summer reading. (A book he’s already read.)

I wonder whether he might prove to be more of a peer and less of a student. Love all my kids, but this one is going to make contributions others probably cannot.

What amazes me is that, just a generation or so ago, it was unusual for any kid to have their own phone in their room. The best we could hope for was a long cord so we could talk to our latest crush without our siblings listening and mocking us mercilessly. We forget how radical this change has been. You know, there is nothing wrong with this younger generation except their parents. That is where the responsibility ultimately has to be. Smartphones are designed to be addictive. Teaching GED courses I hear from a lot of employers. This is what they say they want. Show up, follow orders, pass the drug test, and increasingly, put the damn phone away, you are here to work!

Bah! Direct the kid to financial sites and teach him well the ways of money and politics. He will make his way in the world far better than any mechanic could dream of and never have to soil his hands with undercoating. Unless, of course, he acquires a taste for it as a hobby or just does not like the idea of paying a thousand dollars to a mechanic to change a 70 dollar part, like my stepson and I did under the our car last weekend. That was good, messy fun.

As I tell the young people who ask me, “It is not important that you be of any use to other people. What is important is that you determine what use they are to you.”

When I lived in Louisville one of the schools tried to ban smartphones in the classroom. The reaction was swift and negative…..from the parents. Nearly unanimously they said that they had to be able to get ahold of their child at any time. The school caved.

Great update. Matthew Crawford’s book on distraction is also fantastic. I think the impact on education – reading, writing and thinking- will be devastating. Already see signs of that now. And as Turkle says, what will happen to conversation, our ability to appreciate nature?

Leaving aside the obvious issues with porn and sexting and the like, Smartphones have always struck me as a symptom and a cause at the same time.

What I mean is that in an atomized world (and our culture was already quite atomized when Smartphones started to become common 8-10 years ago), something like this kind of thing was going to be very quick to take root. The internet came along beforehand, of course, and had the same impact albeit on a less ubiquitous scale. People were using the internet to find virtual community with others who were not around them, in part because there was no community around them to speak of due to atomization (and everyone bears responsibility for this really), and in part because people seem to prefer, at least in a kind of “I prefer ice cream” kind of way, that kind of community to the real life one.

There are various reasons for this, of course, ranging from geographic mobility and transience to people preferring privacy and relative anonymity, in many cases, to the kind of “known neighbors and community” that gives other benefits but at the cost of reduced privacy and anonymity. When Smartphones came along and put the internet in everyone’s pocket, regardless of whether they could afford a PC or high speed internet or what have you, this trend accelerated greatly and became almost ubiquitously spread. It took what was already a trend for those who were happy enough to spend a lot of time in front of their laptops or desktops (obviously a self-selected group in various ways) and spread it to people who are not like that in persona (or finances) by putting it in their pocket at a price which is payable by many more people, without tying them down to sitting in front of a computer. So it spread like wildfire — but it was already a trend beforehand for a smaller group of people.

I don’t know how we get away from this, to be honest. The society we live in is increasingly organized around virtual community and not physical/geographical community. And the thing is, while many people lament this (or at least aspects of it), many people …. like it, or at least like aspects of it, or prefer aspects of it to being in the kind of situation where physical community is paramount.

And therein lies the challenge. Why is it that so many seem to prefer virtual community in the form of facebook and instagram and twitter and tinder and so on to in the flesh physical/geographic community? There are many reasons, I think, and many of them are durable for many people. This is why I don’t think that the trend is going away — if anything we are likely to have more screens, more virtual community, for most people, and pockets, here and there, of people who intentionally choose otherwise for various reasons.

I think also that this is why so many people are so lax about their kids with these devices. They prefer them, in many ways, themselves.

You are right that schools cave to easily. I had a standard response to parents who said the same thing when I was teaching in high school a few years back. Call the office, just like YOUR parents did. That is what the office is for!
They didn’t like it, but they couldn’t argue with it. It is noteworthy that the first thing teachers are told to do in an emergency is confiscate the students phones precisely so parents won’t rush to a fire or a tornado or a crime scene in get in the way of first responders and law officers. Let me repeat my new mantra, the only thing wrong with the younger generation is their parents.

Good Lord Greg in PDX! What were your parent’s thinking? Phones cost money, even back then.Nobody I grew up around was going to pay for their teenagers to have their own phone number! Did they at least make you get a job and pay for it. I grew up around the same time you did, but maybe we just had less money in Rural WI.That could definitely skew your results!

“I graduated from high school in 1977. From junior high on my sister and I each had a phone in our room, and our own separate phone number. Most of our classmates did too.”

I graduated in ’79, suburban Long Island. It was definitely not common where I lived. And I spent the first three years of college (UVA) with hall phones only*, and I cannot recall any commenting on that being an unusual state of affairs.

* I normally spoke to my parents for about 10 minutes once a week, making a person-to-person call to myself at their number so they would call me back and pay for the call, SOP for that situation….

“And therein lies the challenge. Why is it that so many seem to prefer virtual community in the form of facebook and instagram and twitter and tinder and so on to in the flesh physical/geographic community? ”

Because many many people live in a community where they’re ignored at best and openly discriminated against at worst.

I’m just not talking about more obvious minorities here either. If you’re a social conservative in San Francisco or Seattle, you’re likely to have almost nobody to talk too about that.

Same thing for other niche interests. Twenty five years ago, a comic book fan had whomever else shopped at their comic book store. Now, you can have thousands of people in a community just about one specific character.

Or you might be the only person in your small town who cares about the history of the Byzantine Empire. Online however – there are at least a few dozen. 🙂

I mean, why are we all here posting instead of talking to people about politics?

I am amazed at how so many young people cannot change a tire, or hotshot a car battery from another car. Nor can they do even the most simple home repairs, such as repairing a faucet. ”
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Yup. One of my son’s was talking to me about that recently. He said it can be one of those elite vs working class things, too. Fewer young men his age who attended private schools can change a tire on their own, etc.
He said that each group (elite / working class) lacks some skills the other side has & each has their own blind spots.
That’s just his observation from folks he knows, but he was totally amazed that his more affluent neighbor couldn’t change a tire.

“Why is it that so many seem to prefer virtual community in the form of facebook and instagram and twitter and tinder and so on to in the flesh physical/geographic community?”

I’m not much into social media, but I definitely agree that a lot of people don’t want to be involved with other real people locally. At least not TOO involved. I’m as guilty as the next person, too–I am allergic to drama, I don’t want to know who is sleeping with whom (okay, I’ll admit I love a juicy piece of gossip as much as the next person, but I don’t seek it out, and really, I don’t want to know the gory details of most people’s private lives, as I prefer to respect people and probably wouldn’t if I knew the truth about a lot of them), I detest petty infighting and jealousies, having to constantly worry about offending because of imagined slights or a sentence phrased badly. And I really have no use for people who act like jerks in my life. This is enough for me to be really, really glad I don’t live in a small village/community in which I have to interact with people I don’t really want to.

If somebody behaves badly or irritates online, I simply ignore, delete, block, etc., and don’t have to deal with the drama, toxicity, maliciousness, stupidity, and so on. I like the control, and I love the privacy.

Plus, an online community made a massive difference in my life when I was dealing with a very specific health problem that required major lifestyle changes in order to heal. The people in that forum understood, supported, and empathized with me (and I with them) in ways nobody local could. I am pretty convinced I would not be in the good health I am in today if it weren’t for that group. So I’m all in support of focused online communities working together to improve lives and alleviate suffering. Or even just to share interests with others who are equally interested in topics that would probably bore the locals to death (or tick them off).

The internet isn’t all bad.

Graduated from high school in 1988. Not only did I not have a private phone, our home phone was on a 4-household party line. You could hear the clicks of people picking up to listen to your conversation. And if any one of them said they had an emergency of any sort, you had to end your conversation immediately so they could use the line. Those were the days!

This is the trajectory of civilization. From its beginning back in the Neolithic, it has been a process of reshaping our surroundings from whatever we found in nature to an environment shaped by humans, for humans. The more “advanced” a society, the less its members have to deal with raw nature. Other people’s real-time faces and voices are the latest component of raw nature that we are making optional. This is going to be particularly hard for people who regard their own real-time faces and voices as inextricably themselves, in the sense that their attitude is: “I am my face and my voice. If you don’t pay attention to these things, I don’t feel loved.” This is what I hear behind adults’ complaints about their children being “glued to the phone”: the kids aren’t meeting the adults’ social needs anymore, and the adults resent it, as each generation has always resented anything their kids like more than them.

As for the kids failing to develop material-world skills, we keep reading about massive numbers of material-world jobs being automated away. People who insist on the development of material-world skills may be preparing the kids for an economy that will be gone by the time they get old enough to join the workforce.

“I graduated from high school in 1977. From junior high on my sister and I each had a phone in our room, and our own separate phone number. Most of our classmates did too.”

I graduated a few years after that. I knew one girl who had her own line (it was convenient for me, since I dated her for a couple of years), and another family where the 5 kids shared a separate phone line. No-one else had their own phone that I remember. There may have been some kids who had an extension in their room — where the parents could pick up another phone and listen any time. But not a separate line.

When I was in college, I talked to my parents once a week for about half an hour. More than that would have been considered extravagant.

I’m just not talking about more obvious minorities here either. If you’re a social conservative in San Francisco or Seattle, you’re likely to have almost nobody to talk too about that.

What a small mind if that’s what you want. I agree that for niche interests, a little time on Facebook can be a good way to get together. But, most of life can darn well be shared with people of varying political attitudes, etc. You don’t have to agree on Donald Trump to admire each other’s rose gardens. You don’t have to agree on same sex marriage to share a friendly game of chess. You don’t have to agree on the Holy Trinity to go hiking in the mountains together. You don’t have to agree on any of the above to have a cordial working relationship on the job.

As for teens having phones, the house I moved into three years ago had (and has) a tangle of phone lines, and had jacks all over the place, many of which have been removed, particularly the one in the bathroom. My next door neighbor grew up in this house. She told me that when the girls became teenagers, their mother said “I’m not going to spend my time answering the phone for you all the time — you can have your friends call your own number.” So, there are various ways parents dealt with that back in the day, for various reasons.

I never had my own phone either, and dorms I recall had only one phone per hallway.

As you write many Christians don´t understand the menace that smart phones pose and therefore don´t restrict the usage.

First porn, next devil worship, then homosexuality, and finally……DANCING!!!
People have been saying this probably since fire was tamed. Heck, I remember in a book about how alphabets came about, a cuneiform copybook text was mentioned that was a variant on the old “where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing” We survived universal literacy, men and women dancing together, ragtime, radio, cars, comics, rock and roll, rap and TV. We’ll survive this.

Uncle Billy= Damn few people can shoe a horse or build a proper coal fire to avoid clinkers, either. With two cars in the family, I don’t think I had to change a tire in over 20 years, probably a good 500k miles. As for faucets, I bought a faucet brand that boasted of their easiness of repair. Found out they no longer made the parts for my five year old faucet and couldn’t get parts for love or money. You can’t win.

Sorry for all the posts running together. Last comment= You say “whistling past the graveyard” I hear “but this time it is different!” Time will tell. However, the socons have a .000 accuracy. You should watch “Black Mirror”. Now there is some dystopia

Why spend the time to learn when for a relative pittance, I can buy AAA or some other form of insurance that’ll send somebody else to fix the tire for me.

Plus, more and more people simply aren’t buying or using cars. You don’t need to learn how to fix a flat when you Uber or at worst, use car sharing services the three or four times a month you need a car to bring in groceries or a big purchase from IKEA or something.

I’m sure there are plenty of things “real men” knew how to do in 1850 that the future grandfathers in 1950 would’ve been lost on.

My son, turning 21 this month, would like me to point out that instructions on tire changing technique is widely available on numerous web sites. YouTube can be very helpful.

I have many years of off road driving experience and have changed literally dozens of tires under very bad circumstances. In ordinary driving on civilized roads, I haven’t had a flat since 1980.

There are lots of other vehicle related skills that were essential if you drove a beater automobile in the 1970s. These skills are no longer essential, or in many cases relevant. There are lots of engine parts under my hood that I can’t even identify, and civilization has continued on, regardless.

Why spend the time to learn when for a relative pittance, I can buy AAA or some other form of insurance that’ll send somebody else to fix the tire for me.

Plus, more and more people simply aren’t buying or using cars. You don’t need to learn how to fix a flat when you Uber or at worst, use car sharing services the three or four times a month you need a car to bring in groceries or a big purchase from IKEA or something.”
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Thank you for your perspective.
For folks who don’t live near Uber or car sharing services, or have a family or business that requires a vehicle, I think tire changing is still a valuable survival skill to have.
I’ve personally been stuck out where there was no cell phone reception to call for assistance. You just never know.
I carry jumper cables & a tow strap in my truck, too.
It’s become a joke with my children, but I’ve always told my daughters when screening future husband material to check & see whether they carry a pocketknife. That gives some idea on how practical & prepared they are. I wouldn’t have mentioned the ability to change a tire because I thought that was a given.

My 14-year-old daughter has gotten a great self-guided art education via her phone/iPad over the past two years. She’s passionate that art (specifically animation) will be her career and her Instagram is full of art inspiration and is also a place where she can put her art out into the world and get the feedback of similarly passioned people using a few well-worded hashtags. On her own, she created a business website to promote her art and has participated in enough anime fandoms to know exactly what she wanted to create to stock her own booth at a local Comic-con. I was hoping she’d manage to sell a few pieces to non-family members. I was shocked to watch as kid after kid ran up to her booth in total excitement to buy her pins and prints. She made more money in one weekend than she could have in a summer working for minimum wage. I watched her sit for hours and hours assembling button after button to prep for this event. Technology can be a wonderful tool. I’m not naive enough to think that there is nothing to worry about with her being online, but I’ve also talked to her lots about what pitfalls to avoid and she’s told me tales of ways kids she knows misuse their devices (like the boy in her Catholic school class, whose mother won’t allow him to trick or treat, asking for (and receiving) nude photos from girls. Teaching them how to use the technology is way more effective than banning it, in my opinion.

Tech doesn’t change your kids, it simply hastens the inevitable result of what their social milieu (mainly: how you are raising them) is pushing them towards. I grew up believing that all knowledge is practically useful and regardless of if and how educational institutions I was in would value it. Had I had a smartphone I would probably be on Wikipedia all day.

Also note how conservatives always deal from a position of weakness in issues like these. If your countercultural kids are just as easily influenced as kids in the cultural mainstream, perhaps you’ve spent too much time teaching them your norms instead of your values. Which, paradoxically, reinforces the spell that these things have cast over you and your children. Same as when conservatives claim there is such a thing as porn addiction: it ignores how easy it is for normal people to live without porn, thereby normalizing those with abnormal obsessions.

Was talking to my sister yesterday. She said the kids in her 7th graders’ school all carry smartphones because they are routinely expected to photograph homework assignments, record lectures, and read downloaded textbooks on them.

I agree with Jen’s comment above; teaching kids to use technology will work better than banning it. Schools need to keep on top of bullying in all forms, physical and virtual, and parents need to talk to their children about why watching porn is bad for them. And parents and schools alike need to teach kids how to put phones down and walk away from them, for heaven’s sake. Haven’t parents and schools always had to teach children self control?

Mike W says:
Self-reliance used to be a good thing.”
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It still is. Even if you don’t need those skills today, you never know what the future will bring. Being prepared is never a bad idea.